Syria, we have failed you.

I’m sorry that the world has failed you. How Muslim leaders failed you and more importantly how the Muslim Ummah has failed you. Innocent people are being executed because they stood up to a vicious dictator. The world is ending for the people in Aleppo, that’s about 100,000+ people. There are people uploading videos to social media and saying that this will most likely be the last time we will hear from them. How does that leave us so unaffected? We stood by indifferently for so long and watched it get to this point. This is on our hands too.

Never have we known so much about a genocide, yet done so little.

When we learn about the Holocaust in school all of us question how humanity let that happen to human beings. We read Anne Frank’s diary and shed tears over the suffering of those people. We wonder how people could sit by and watch all of this happen? Today, we read Facebook messages and tweets about how the Syrian people are suffering yet we still sit by and do nothing. Our silence for six years has gotten us to this point that our brothers and sisters are being slaughtered. The concept of “The Muslim Ummah” must be so ridiculous to the Syrian people because all we have done is watch them bleed. We are so busy in our lives in our own routines that we have turned our heads to their suffering. We have become desensitized and blind.

The worst part of all this is that in a few weeks this will be “old news” and we will carry on with our daily lives and we will forget about how the Syrian people suffered and how they are still suffering to get back on their feet. How they are suffering and grieving the loss of their loved ones some of which died in front of their eyes, in their arms.

I understand that we cannot do much on our own but ask yourself how many times before this week did you pray for the people in Syria? How many times did you keep the Ummah in your prayers? They were our people. They were our Ummah.

It’s ignorant to say that we should blame the entire world, the world that does not care about us instead of pointing out the flaws in our own Ummah.

“What is wrong with you, why don’t you help each other?” [37:25]

Allah (SWT) will ask us why we did not do more to help our Ummah. Why we remained silent and neutral in this situation? This was a test for you, for me, for our Ummah and we failed. We failed horribly.

“When the war is over in my country, we will close Syria’s doors and we will put a banner that says: (NO ENTRY). We will shed tears of joy alone, just like how we suffered our grief alone.” – excerpt from a Syrian boy’s diary